Jesus was a progressive.
He arrived two thousand years ago, not with vague religious nostalgia or territorial separatist dogma but with a bold, clear vision that pulled disparate people forward together in interdependent community.
He started a revolutionary underground movement of people of the street, not a top-down theocracy of wealth and power and cloistered privilege. His sermons didn’t harken back to some mythical glorious time in the past. Instead he announced that the new kingdom had now come: a counterintuitive way of living and of being in the world marked by goodness and empathy.
Far from a culture war, “return to family values,” or the politicized promise of “making Judea great again,” Jesus’ message for the religious elite of his faith tradition was the warning that new wine cannot be held in old, dried-up, brittle wineskin minds: that something beautiful had come to burst from the rigid, lifeless container that could no longer hold it—the one called religion.
Jesus was a heretic.
He claimed to be divinity, arriving not in political power or military might but in quiet gentleness; not as an armed, avenging soldier but a humble, suffering servant who in humility would get low to lift others. He came in paradox as the God who would wash feet. Jesus was scandalous to the religious establishment because he declared that God was not just the God of the temple but of the gutter as well—that the beggars and the priests were of equal worth. Two millennia before many of his professed followers would defend their own bigotry by saying that “all lives matter,” Jesus simply lived in a way that proved they did. He fed and healed and loved them equally.
That is why he spent so many of his days among the rabble, touching lepers, dining with prostitutes, lounging with pariahs, and accepting invitations to the homes of the powerful, where he challenged their privileged perspectives. It’s why he lived in the margins and on the fringes and why he made the self-righteous squirm and protest and condemn.
Jesus was “woke.”
The radical activist declared us all responsible for our brothers, for our neighbors, even our enemies. His followers created interdependent communities where each was accountable to the other. He was a maker of peace, a turner of cheeks, a lover of all: a homeless, dark-skinned Jewish rabbi who said that love of wealth would make it almost impossible to really see God. He preached not about the poor pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps but about the well-off giving up something so that they could be cared for.
Jesus was heretical to the religious folks of his day who had drifted so far from the essence of God that they were oblivious to it when it was in their midst. Goodness and decency had become unrecognizable to them. They were so preoccupied by the shimmering lure of power and so lulled into the comfort of their privilege that they forgot their call to sacrificial love for the least.
It was this bold, unapologetic, activist heart of Jesus that caused him the greatest pushback and ultimately his execution, and things are not so different today. Today’s conservatives—including many who loudly claim the name of Jesus—would label him a member of the radical left, woke mob meriting cancelation.
History will show that when the elderly, the sick, and the vulnerable showed up in need, it was not the Conservative Christians who cared for them as Jesus would have. It was the Progressive Christians, the Muslims, the Jews, the Humanists, and the Atheists who stood together alongside the orphans and the widows, the ignored and forgotten, the lonely and discarded, all responding together in love in a way the followers of Christ were supposed to but tired of.
The job of revealing the nature of scandalous love is once again in the hands of the heretics, sinners, and unlikely mercy-givers.
God is once again moving in the world, coming in ways that look like heresy to the religious, which is exactly the way it was two thousand years ago.
It will be a movement of the unlikely, the odd, the profane, and the outsiders who together will recover the sacred lost art of giving a damn.
They will open their hands and they will give and heal and help in ways that alter the planet and that look like whatever God is supposed to look like. One way or another, the love Jesus once preached will again speak loudly in these days— even if the Church stays silent.
Blessed are the woke mob...
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